PCA High Roller Event Taken Down By Leonid Bilokur

Sunday, January 15th, 2012 by Ryan

Is it just me, or does Jonathan Duhamel’s name seem to be popping up all over the place since the home invasion and robbery on his house? Fortunately, it looks like Duhamel’s had a bit of good luck after that tough situation which left him physically injured, and short of over $100k in cash, his World Series of Poker gold bracelet, and a $5k Rolex from the online poker site PokerStars. While he is back in the poker news today for his impressive run at the PCA $25k High Roller event, he pulled off a second place finish in this event, but the real story was about Leonid Bilokur, who took down the huge first place prize for one of the toughest events out there.

You may not know the name Leonid Bilokur, as he’s fairly new to the live tournament scene, with only two years of experience under his belt. He’s pulled off a few small scores, but this score is definitely one that will remain at the top of his achievements, regardless of what other types of scores he gets in his promising upcoming poker career. The main reasons for this, are first off because of the huge first place pay day, but also because of the impressive players that he had to beat out in order to win this one. Bilokur was up against the likes of Duhamel, Randy “nanonoko” Lew, Ike Haxton, Jason Koon, and Nicolas Fierro. And that list of players was just the other players at the final table!

When heads up play began, Duhamel was sitting pretty with a 2.5 to 1 chip lead over Bilokur. Remember, he had already finished 4th in the $100k Super High Roller event, 5th in the $5k No Limit event, $1st in a $5k event, and was now in a heads up match for this championship as well. Now, he had to hold on to this chip lead against a hungry player in Bilokur, who refused to go down without a fight. He continued to just slowly build his chip stack before he ended up taking the chip lead away from Duhamel. It all came to an end on the last hand when Bilokur made a dominant full house that gave him the championship.

Before this event, Bilokur’s biggest score came at the 2010 European Poker Tour Germany event, in which he won $236k for taking down a side event. For winning this event, he received a $1.1 million payday, that will leave the Russian heading back from the Bahamas with a nice smile on his face. In total, Bilokur took home $1,134,930, Duhamel took down $634,550 for second, and Isaac Haxton finished in third to take home $380,730.

A quick note to point out about Duhamel as well, is that after his second place finish in this one, he finds himself just outside of the top ten in the all time tournament winnings list. Currently he sits in 12th place, just behind another well-known player in Peter Eastgate. Duhamel has pulled in a total of $10,809,913 in his career to this point, and you can bet that he still has quite a bit of poker left in him in the coming years!